Pop star ig­nites selfie craze

Hun­dreds of peo­ple could be found wait­ing in line for hours on the Bund last week, not be­cause they were queu­ing to buy tick­ets to a cruise ride, but be­cause they sim­ply wanted a selfie — with a mail­box.

The craze was started when Chi­nese pop star Lu Han posted on Weibo a photo of him­self stand­ing be­side that par­tic­u­lar mail­box on April 8, one day be­fore his con­cert at the Shang­hai Grand Stage.

Re­ac­tion to Lu’s post was swift, with peo­ple turn­ing up at that very lo­ca­tion just an hour later around mid­night. By day­break, a queue mea­sur­ing more than 200 me­ters had al­ready formed. A se­cu­rity staff sur­named You told The Pa­per that he was “fright­ened” by the crowd as well as the fre­quent en­quiries about the lo­ca­tion of this mail­box.

Fans of the pop star could still be found queu­ing on the night of his con­cert. The Pa­per re­ported that the queue only started to dis­si­pate around 6 pm on April 10.

“Many of us girls have come from other cities for the con­cert, and we’d like to have pic­tures taken at the same lo­ca­tion as our idol be­fore we leave town,” said a fan named Guo Fang.

“It’s just like how many peo­ple are hav­ing pic­tures taken at the same cross­ing The Bea­tles were at. We just don’t want to leave the city with any re­gret.”

One of the most pop­u­lar idols in China, Lu be­gan his ca­reer as a mem­ber of EXO, a group of 12 men from SM Com­pany, a ma­jor en­ter­tain­ment agency in South Korea. The mas­sively pop­u­lar 26-year-old set a Guin­ness World Record in 2014 for hav­ing the Weibo post with the most num­ber of replies. His foot­ball-themed post gar­nered more than 13 mil­lion com­ments as of Aug 5, 2014. Lu has 17 mil­lion fol­low­ers on Weibo, Chi­nese for mi­croblog.

The singer’s first mu­sic al­bum Reloaded was re­leased last De­cem­ber and his Reloaded con­cert tour took place in Bei­jing and Guangzhou be­fore end­ing in Shang­hai. The con­cert tick­ets were priced be­tween 420 yuan ($65) and 1,990 yuan, al­most the same price range as Amer­i­can su­per­star Tay­lor Swift. Just like his Amer­i­can coun­ter­part, Lu’s con­cert tick­ets were sold out im­me­di­ately upon re­lease — ac­cord­ing to ifeng.com, there were no tick­ets left to his Bei­jing show just 30 sec­onds af­ter they were made avail­able on­line.